It was back to trend in its final quarter for equity-controlled mid-tier offshore services firm, Mphasis, with revenues from ex-parent HP(E)– or we should now say DXC– in decline, though it would be reasonable to assume that DXC had its mind on other priorities in the lead up to its grand unveiling (see Official launch day for DXC Technology).

Having said that, growth in Mphasis’ ‘direct’ business over the year to 31st March 2017 was just enough (less a bit) to keep the top line steady, finishing at Rs60.76b, though this translated into a 2.3% decline in USD terms to $905m. Better news was that Mphasis got more bang for the buck, with FY operating margins up nearly two points to 14.6%, which is there or thereabouts for mid-tier Indian pure-plays.

New CEO, Nitin Rakesh, is hopeful that companies in owner Blackstone’s portfolio will provide ‘additional tailwinds to accelerate growth’, though it will be interesting to see whether Mphasis is any more successful generating business from its new parent than it was with its old!

HR is an ideal target for the use of machine intelligence because it is data rich, with complexities around people and data relationships. That’s what UK start up Qlearsite, who describes itself as 'organisational scientists', is hooking into. It provides machine learning enabled ‘People Analytics” software that carries out statistical analysis on employee data. It has captured the attention of Summa Digital, established by Summa Equity, to the tune of $7.7m.

The funding will be used to move the product forward and accelerate recruitment. However, Qlearsite will also work with Summa Digital to build links with big data analytics companies. As the value of broad and mixed (but relevant) data sets gains recognition, suppliers who can facilitate relationships among data owners and customers will be in an advantageous position.

This is, I believe, the first time on record that quarterly operating margins at Mumbai-based offshore IT services firm Tech Mahindra have plunged into single digits. Thus ended Q4 (to 31st March 2017), with a 30%+ decline in operating profit, dragging margins down over 5 points yoy to 8.2%. There were apparently multiple mishaps, involving exiting troublesome contracts in Lightbridge Communications Corporation, which Tech Mahindra acquired in 2014, along with ‘reprofiling of spend in our Legacy business’, aka restructuring.

As a result, FY17 operating margins lost over two points yoy to 11.0%, on revenues of $4.35b, just under 8% higher than in FY16. I estimate that around 2 points of this growth was contributed by the acquisitions of Target Group and BIO. This is Tech Mahindra’s third consecutive year of decline in headline growth rate.

You’ll be able to compare and contrast the performance of the leading Indian pure-plays in the next edition of OffshoreViews.

Kainos has reported its sixth consecutive year of growth with full year results to end March 2017 revealing 9% growth in revenue to £83.5m. Compound revenue growth over the last six years now stands at 46%. Margins didn’t keep pace with revenue though as Kainos increased investment in both R&D (it doubled to £4.6m) and the sales team during the period – adjusted PBT increased by just 1% to £14.3m and statutory PBT declined by 7% to £13.3m. The last year has also been a period of strong recruitment for Kainos with staff numbers increasing by 135 to 975 at year end.

Delve behind the headline numbers and an interesting picture emerges. The UK-based provider of digital services and platforms saw UK revenue decline by 0.6% to £64.8m. Geographically the strongest growth came from Europe/other (+188% to £5.5m revenue) and Ireland (+62% to £8.7m) and the proportion of revenue generated from customers outside the UK increased by 40% to 21% of total revenue (2016: 15% of total revenue).

By division, Digital Services was the star of the show. FY17 Digital Services revenue increased by 17% to £64.5m and gross profit from the division climbed by 23% to £31.2m. The services business continues to benefit from significant ongoing engagements with the UK government’s digital transformation programme – at the Driver and Vehicle Standards Agency and Land Registry, for example – and accelerated growth in Workday implementations, where Kainos’ growing reputation and European presence plus consolidation in the supplier market bode well for continued future growth.

In contrast, the Digital Platforms business saw revenue (including lower margin third party revenue) decrease by 12% to £19m. This is largely a result of a slowdown in the NHS market, where revenue from its Evolve EMR product (excluding third party revenue) declined by 12% to £10m in line with previous guidance (see Move to digital drives growth at Kainos).

CEO Brendan Mooney told us this morning that he expects the NHS to remain a challenging market over the coming year despite manifesto promises of additional funding from the main UK parties. Generally, however, the outlook is a positive one for Kainos with strong growth potential particularly from the Workday business in Europe and Evolve Integrated Care in the US healthcare market. As to the impact of Brexit and the election on the UK public sector business, Mooney says if anything they’ve seen a slight increase in activity reflecting both the importance of the various departmental digitisation initiatives and the maturity of the market.

As UKHotViews heralded in early May (see Alfa to beat a path to Stock Market listing), specialist asset finance software company Alfa Financial Software launched onto the UK Main Market at the end of last week.

The offering price was 325p, but the shares leapt to around 430p by Friday’s close. The narrow float of just over a quarter of the company’s shares and the likely inclusion of the stock in the FTSE 250 added to the early demand for the shares. Nearly 70% of Alfa’s shares will remain in the hands of CHP Software and Consulting, 100% owned by the Chairman and CEO of Alfa. Much of the recent press attention has focused on the pay-out that these two key individuals will receive as a result of the float.

However, Alfa’s business model, and in our view its inherent attractiveness, are clear. Provide standardised, scale-advantaged and cloud-based software and processing platforms to an increasingly complex niche of the financial services business and create a “sticky” customer list.  This list extends across the major participants in the industry, including Barclays, Mercedes-Benz and Bank of America, 6 of the top 10 UK equipment lessors and into 18 countries.

It’s still early days, but this looks like a very successful float, the largest in the UK for a technology company for almost two years, for what is now the fifth largest software company on the LSE.

Enthusiastic investors have obviously put to the back of their minds the growing concerns of an over-heating US car market and the over-extended credit positions of consumers in many developed markets.

It’s an established rule of business that when things go wrong companies are judged on how they handle the situation. The immediate aftermath is where major reputational damage is exacerbated – or minimised. Dreadful handling of the IT systems failure that crippled British Airways over the past three days will haunt BA long after the technical problems are resolved.

In his first interview, two days after the IT incident, BA chief executive Alex Cruz said the problem was due to a power surge and a backup system that did not work properly. He said the hardware problem had been resolved after a few hours, but did not comment on why it was taking so long to bring all the systems back on line. He stated that it was not a cyber-attack.

A power surge could well have taken out power supply units across the infrastructure and if there was no software enabled provision to switch to a replica server or if it failed for some reason, then chaos would be the expected result. There are so many questions though. What happened to the disaster recovery plan a company of BA’s size surely must have had in place; a plan that ought to have been tested to see how it coped with an ugly shutdown. Why did it take so long to bring the systems back up? Was that down to a patchwork of systems and was it impacted by the availability (or not) of skilled people with broad knowledge of the complicated application landscape? Were there problems with data synchronisation across different software systems? There are also questions over who was responsible for protecting against eventualities like power surges or cuts and ensuring failover and replication. Was this BA’s direct remit or had it outsourced these activities – in an era of hosting and cloud services this is a complicated but highly pertinent question.

It will take time for the answers to filter through but at the very least it looks like a monumental failure (hopefully not the absence) of a pre-tested disaster recovery plan. Worse still is the handling of the situation – the lack of communication over the wires (apart from a few Twitter videos), in the media and airport terminals and contingency plans for dealing with this scale of problem. BA can expect a very expensive compensation bill but the damage to its reputation, may well be worse. There will be lessons for BA but other organisations and their IT suppliers should also be watching and learning.

Early bird tickets for the TechMarketView Presentation & Dinner 2017 are available for tables booked before Thursday 1st June so don’t delay – book your place now via the registration form here.

This year’s Evening with TechMarketView will take place of Thursday 5 October 2017 at the magnificent Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) in Portland Place, London.

The enjoyable evening provides a mix of valuable insight from TechMarketView’s leading analyst team with quality networking over drinks and a three-course dinner. It is TechMarketView’s flagship event and a fixture in the calendars of leading figures across the UK software, IT services and business process services sectors (SITS).

Unlocking the Intelligence

Join us on October 5 to rub shoulders with some 250 of UK tech’s ‘great & good’ and to hear TechMarketView’s analysts share their views on the latest developments across the sector under the banner of TechMarketView’s 2017 research theme, Unlocking the Intelligence.

The guestlist for the evening – which has been a sellout for the last four years - typically includes CXOs from a broad range of SITS companies large and small, CIOs from public and private sector organisations, and a cross section of others with a keen interest in how the sector is evolving, including decision makers from the VC and private equity community. 

Early Bird Pricing for tables booked before June 1

If previous years are anything to go by, tickets are likely to sell quickly so we’d recommend booking early. Discounted early bird tickets are now available for tables booked before 1 June 2017. And, as in previous years, TechMarketView research subscription clients are also eligible for a 20% discount on standard ticket prices both on Early Bird tables and on tickets booked individually or after 1 June. For full details and to book your place visit tx2Events here.

Sponsorship opportunities

We also have a number of sponsorship opportunities related to the event. These provide a fantastic opportunity for our partners to raise brand awareness with prospective clients and partners and to get their message out to a high-profile audience from the world of UK tech. For more details on the available sponsorship packages and to express your interest in being considered as a sponsor please contact TechMarketView Managing Director Tola Sargeant (tsargeant@techmarketview.com or 01798 865231).

Very surprising news has emerged that big data analytics provider Fusionex has started the process to cancel its AIM listing, calling an EGM on June 15 to seek approval for the move, with a view to cancellation on June 27.

The directors believe the company is being undervalued and that the AIM listing has lost much of its original attraction, citing “multiple and complex” factors but including the lack of liquidity and ‘lack of in-depth independent research into the company". It also refers to the cost of maintaining the listing and how the resources could be better spent within the business – which suggests it will not be looking to list elsewhere soon. As regular readers will know, Fusionex is a success story in the big data analytics area (see our coverage here). The directors state that the AIM decision does not reflect any weakness in the business.

In the statement issued regarding the decision, there was a veiled reference to Brexit, with the company referring to political uncertainty in Europe playing a part in its decision. Let’s hope it was just one of many factors and not the main one.

More top management changes are in the air at Noida-based mid-tier offshore services firm, NIIT Technologies, with the appointment of Genpact executive (and prior, Infosys exec) Sudhir Singh as NIIT Tech’s CEO designate. Singh will take over from current CEO & Joint MD Arvind Thakur during the course of the year.

NIIT Tech has been shuffling the top deck since the departure of COO Sudhir Chaturvedi to LTI (Larsen & Toubro Infotech) last September (see LTI scoops NIIT Tech COO) and been running a dual-MD structure since then (which is rarely, if ever, the 'right answer').

Like most mid-tier peers, NIIT Tech has had a tough year, but closed FY17 with a bit of a flourish (see NIIT Tech puts the pedal to the metal). This will be Singh’s first time as CEO of a listed company. That in itself brings its own challenges.

It’s home insurance with a ‘smart home’ twist. London-based Neos bundles in a bunch of tech with its home insurance policies with the aim of alerting homeowners to problems on their mobile devices. The tech includes leak detectors, window/door sensors, motion sensors, smoke detectors and a videocam, which come at ‘no charge’ with the policy (and an engineer to fit them!).

Neos raised £1m in October last year, in a seed funding round led by ‘insuretech’-focused Eos Venture Partners, and various individuals including Gary Lineker. At the time, Neos was valued at £8.4m. Neos has just announced an investment of a further £5m in a Series A round led by Aviva Ventures, and introducing Munich Re as a ‘strategic partner’. No valuation was disclosed. Policies are issued through Bermuda-headquartered, UK-focused insurer Hiscox, which is also involved with insuretech startup InsureStreet (see Angels help InsureStreet help renters get the key to the door).

According to Neos’ website, there is no minimum contract or minimum term and no cancellation fee. It looks like the way Neos wants to make the policy ‘sticky’ is by developing (‘in the near future’) interfaces to other smart home devices such as lights, speakers and entertainment systems. Neos currently works with Amazon Alexa, with support for other such devices slated for development. This will be key if Neos is to be able to amortise the cost of the tech – which they also maintain (as in supply batteries) at no extra fee – and (eventually) make a profit.

On the other hand, what’s to stop traditional insurers offering a similar deal? Or indeed Amazon, which already dabbles in the UK insurance market with a 4-year breakdown and accidental damage policy for audio systems.

I can’t quite call them a ‘new kid on the block’ as Bangalore-based mid-tier offshore services firm Sonata Software has been around for over 30 years and in the UK since 1997. But Sonata is on a mission to make a breakthrough in the UK market where it is currently just a bit-part player (see Sonata cranks up volume of its offshore serenade).

Sonata closed FY17 (to 31st March) with impressive headline growth – up 30% to Rs25.2b (c.$375m). Most of this (71%) derives from its domestic operations (software product resale and infrastructure services) which soared ahead with 39% growth. In contrast, Sonata’s international IT services business grew by 15% to around $120m, of which about 60% comes from the US and 20% from the UK.

However, this growth came at the cost of profit, which remained flat yoy, dragging down EBITDA margins by nearly three points to 9.5%. International IT services profit was also flat, leaving EBITDA margins at a still very creditable 22.7%, though again a few points down yoy.

But wanting to make a breakthrough is different from actually making a breakthrough. It’s taken Sonata 20 years to get to get to some £20m in UK revenues. Dramatic action would be surely required.

Cambridge-based UltraSoC has just closed another round of funding, attracting both new and existing investors. Atlante Tech, Enso Ventures, Oxford Capital and entrepreneur, Guillaume d'Eyssautier, are new to the line up. They join existing investors Octopus Ventures and South East Seed Fund (FSE Group).

UltraSoC’s semiconductor IP enables chip designers to integrate an intelligent analytics infrastructure into the core hardware of their device. The tech allows designers to create “systems on chips” (SoC) that have built-in intelligence able to respond to changing requirements for power consumption, performance and security. An interesting application of the technology is that even after a device is shipped, the manufacturer can undertake development and optimisation work on the finished system (e.g. power perfromance on a smart phone).

HiSilicon (Huawei), Imagination Technologies, Movidius (now Intel), and Microsemi are among those that already use UltraSoC technology in their chip designs. UltraSoC’s latest funding round raised £5m, which will be used to help it roll out the technology to more chip manufacturers.

We’re always delighted to share good news from our erstwhile Little British Battlers (LBBs) and that’s exactly what we heard when we caught up with Terry Walby, the CEO of intelligent automation software SME Thoughtonomy.

UK-headquartered Thoughtonomy has this week opened not one but two offices in the US – one in New York City and one in Austin, Texas – as part of plans to double its global workforce in the next 12 months. It is also putting additional investment into strengthening its strategic partnerships with global, regional and specialist organisations – including Atos, CGI and Fujitsu - and continuing to enhance its Virtual Workforce automation platform.

Thoughtonomy has grown considerably since it took part in our LBB programme in 2014 (see Little British Battlers – The Fourth Generation). Walby’s target is to triple revenue each year and he says Thoughtonomy has achieved that for the last three years and is on track to grow by 300% again this year.

TechMarketView subscription clients can read more on Thoughtonomy’s progress and plans in today’s UKHotViewsExtra article: Thoughtonomy scaling up in Intelligent Automation.

If you don’t yet subscribe to our in-depth research and analysis services and you’d like to know more please email Deborah Seth, our Sales & Marketing Director, for details of our subscription packages.

BT’s deal with Bridgestone Europe is exactly the type of converged infrastructure contract the telco has been coveting in the last few years and needs to keep winning if it is to cement any reputation as a cloud service provider.

As with so many other BT customers, the agreement is anchored on the telco’s core international network connectivity capabilities, setting up secure IP virtual private network (VPN) links between over 200 of the Japanese tire and rubber manufacturer’s retail stores and offices across Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) as well as on-site fixed and wireless local area networks (LANs).

But Bridgestone will also deploy BT’s cloud hosted One Cloud Cisco unified communications and collaboration and Cloud Contact Cisco contact centre platform as managed services.

Growing its reputation in the cloud/software as a service (SaaS) market is important for BT from both a commercial and strategic perspective. Other recent contracts (including Metropolitan PoliceandT-Systems) have seen those cloud hosting elements rather more understated as the telco was left to deliver core connectivity alone.

The timing of the Bridgestone announcement suggests the contract was very close to being finalised before BT’s management decided to alter the focus of its ailing Global Services division to prioritise cloud hosting and service delivery over network connectivity for multinational customers (MNCs) earlier this month.

So whilst it may not be an early sign of success for the altered Global Services strategy, it nevertheless reinforces a strong message and demonstrates that BT is able to execute on its vision.

European managed services player, Claranet, has announced three acquisitions across its European operations. These include Sec-1 in the UK, which provides vulnerability and penetration testing services (revenue of £6m). The company will continue to exist both as a trading entity and a brand, with Managing Director, Gary O’Leary-Steele, staying on. Additionally, Claranet has announced the acquisition of Oxalide in France and ITEN Solutions in Portugal, which together add DevOps and Systems Integration capabilities to the Group.

Together, the three acquisitions bring breadth and depth to Claranet’s portfolio, enhancing its core managed hosting/services offerings. In the recent past the company has been busy on the M&A front making small but strategically important bolt-on acquisitions that add important capability in growth areas of the market. For example, Bashton Limited, Techgate and LinuxIT. Indeed, we calculate that Claranet has made around 20 acquisitions in the past four years alone.

Claranet’s annualised revenues will now stand at £310m, of which the UK accounts for just over a third by our estimates. The company is growing organically as well as via acquisitions, with growth estimated to be in the mid-single digit range.

Outside of the acquisitions there was also the recent news that French-based investment firm, Tikehau Capital, has taken a minority stake in Claranet. It’s a clear indication that the investment community sees further potential for the firm to evolve and grow. Furthermore, we see some similarities between Claranet and Rackspace, which is also looking to develop a deeper and broader set of capabilities outside of infrastructure services with M&A playing a pivotal role in that – see Rackspace’s private ownership gives way to evolution.

TechMarketView has written recently on the changes and opportunities that will result from the move to Open Banking and the introduction of PSD2 (see our latest report here) and we expect that the final version of the PSD2 Authentication regulations (“SCA”) will be published over the next few days. These regulations have been the focus of much debate with accusations of “overkill” being levied as the EU wants (expensive and extensive) strong authentication measures to be put in place for relatively small transactions. The forthcoming announcement will eliminate another element of uncertainty (and an excuse for procrastination) and the banks will have no alternative but to crack on to meet the increasingly tight 2018 deadline.

As we wrote, the new banking and payments structures will require banks to make strategic choices as to the role they aim to play as competition increases and as powerful new entrants gain greater access to account and customer information.

As banks look to transform they will need help, looking to third-party suppliers to accelerate their rate of change, reduce costs and to address new opportunities. We covered this extensively in last year’s report on the role of banking software providers in the sector’s transformation. As banks face additional challenges in terms of digitalisation, cost reduction and customer expectations, they will increasingly look to suppliers with a breadth of capability rather than selecting point solutions.

In this respect, it was interesting to see the recent move by Sopra Banking Software to align more closely with Axway to build a digital platform to meet more closely the transformation needs of banks across Europe and to enable greater collaboration between partners. This move builds on the progress discussed in our report; Sopra Steria – Working together in UK Financial Services.

Graphic-intensive visualisation applications such as CAD and CGI require a lot of grunt so usually run on dedicated, high-performance workstations. Cheshire-based startup, ebb3, aims to unshackle users and let them run these apps ‘from the cloud’ on any device, wherever they happen to be.

To help them do this, VCT funds managed by Maven Capital Partners have invested £1m in ebb3 with the potential of a further £0.5m in follow-on funding.

There is scant information about how this all actually works. ebb3 refers to its High Performance Virtual Computers which run the users’ apps. By implication, these are hosted machines but they don’t say what they are and who actually hosts them. And sheer ‘grunt’ is just one part of visualisation story. You also need very fast, very high bandwidth data paths to drive the display devices if you want ultra-high definition, real-time imaging. This is less of an issue for CAD applications, but a very real issue for CGI and technical modelling applications.

Undoubtedly the ebb3 team know all this and have factored it in to their solution – and I assume have priced it accordingly. If they have cracked it, then this is very exciting indeed.

(Footnote: Many, many years ago I was IBM’s product manager for high-performance computing in the Asia-Pac region. In those days (I’m talking about the late ‘80’s) you needed ‘real’ supercomputers to drive the sorts of graphic-intensive apps that can run today on relatively inexpensive workstations and even PCs. Hardware and data bandwidth weren't the only issues – it was as much the capability of the software to drive the highly parallel processing systems. This challenge, I suspect, has not changed even today.)

A major bandwidth upgrade to the Joint Academic Network (JANET) serving the UK’s higher and further education institutions will see £120m of contracts shared between multiple telecommunications infrastructure suppliers over five years.

The framework tender issued by the government funded Jisc, splits provision into three lots: connectivity, aggregation and colocation, and professional services.

The emphasis is on the provision of core telecommunications and network infrastructure hardware - point of presence (PoP) connectivity, backhaul, dark fibre, Ethernet etc across around 19 regional broadband networks across the UK that make up JANET. And bidders for lot 2 will have to demonstrate their prowess with the Juniper Networks and Ciena equipment already in place.

But there is also an opportunity for SITS suppliers to co-ordinate the design, deployment and ongoing support of the revamped JANET infrastructure which is expected to boost bandwidth at UK universities, colleges and schools from 1Gbit/s to multiple 10Gbit/s or 100Gbit/s links.

A supplier briefing day is scheduled to be held in London on June 6^th, with invitations to tender expected by 7^th July (expressions of interest must be filed by June 22^nd). We don't anticipate there will be any shortage of bidders, with both national and regional telcos and broadband service providers looking equally well placed to capitalise.

The big news for Qinetiq in its FY17 results (to end March 2017) is that it has recorded organic revenue growth for the first time in several years. Total year-on-year growth stood at 4%, taking revenues to £783.1m; organically (and at constant currency), growth stood at 1%. At Group level, the adjusted operating profit grew 6.8% to £116.3m.

There’s a lot going on under the covers. EMEA Services still makes up the bulk of revenues. And, here, revenues declined organically – down from £616.4m to £613.5m. Also, operating profit for the division fell by £4.6m, pushing the margin from 15.2% to 15.1%. The continuing issue faced here is the lower baseline profit rate for single source contracts. As Qinetiq continues to pursue its strategy of leading and modernising UK defence test & evaluation, the big news in December 2016 was the securing of a £1b extension to its Long Term Partnering Agreement (LTPA) with the UK MoD (see Qinetiq grabs longer term certainty in key contract) – its “largest and most significant contract secured since privatisation”.

The LTPA agreement provided Qinetiq with greater medium-term certainty and the EMEA Services business, and particularly its work with the MoD (representing 65% of Group revenues) continues to provide a strong business foundation. Indeed, it is this security (74% of FY18 revenue is under contract) that has allowed Qinetiq to continue to invest – in FY17, investment in “people, technology and campaigns” totalled £20m.

Looking ahead, while the EMEA Services division expects just “modest revenue growth” in FY18, it is the business’ diversification – internationally and into products – that is set to drive Group expansion. It was the much smaller Global Products division that enabled top-line organic revenue growth in the last financial year; here, revenues grew organically by 8% to £169.6m. Moreover, the Group has now established an international business, completing two acquisitions (Meggitt Target Systems and RubiKon Group in Australia) to support international growth. Already in FY17, the % of revenues from MoD has dropped from 67% to 65%, with slightly more coming from US DoD and other Government agencies.

Since being acquired by Apollo Global Management last August, Rackspace has been moving forward on a strategy to deepen expertise and speed up growth.

Last month the company, which has historically been largely focused on mid-sized organisations, launched its Global Solutions and Services (GSS). The new operation aims to help enterprise customers plan, assess, design, and migrate to the cloud. Interestingly, Rackspace could well be offering these professional services to organisations that are not - in the first instance at least - hosting customers.

Rackspace has quickly followed up on this with the announcement last week that it has acquired Massachusetts-headquartered TriCore, taking it into enterprise applications management markets. Specialist areas include Oracle, SAP and database managed services. By our reckoning this is Rackspace’s ninth acquisition in a decade and it looks to be its largest. TriCore also provides some of the same infrastructure services as Rackspace, but it is those capabilities in applications that open up a new set of possibilities. This also means the company’s competition will broaden, taking it out of the traditional infrastructure services arena to cross swords with application services players. In other words, the combination of Rackspace’s new GSS business and the TriCore expertise will mean both new market opportunities but also more and new types of competition. While that will be challenging, we believe these are the right steps for Rackspace to help it to move further away from generic infrastructure-as-a-service and hosting offerings where it is incredibly difficult to differentiate and compete.

Overseeing Rackspace’s evolution will be new CEO, Joe Eazor, who steps up to the plate in mid June. Eazor’s background is interesting with time spent at EarthLink (the ISP and comms firm), EMC, HP and EDS. We have no doubt his ‘masters’ at Apollo will have a very clear vision for what – and over what period of time – needs to be achieved.